If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

That's true, but the main point is it's better when OS has control of its drivers. Windows lives mainly, because it's supported by third party members. Linux was in much worse situation, because it rarely had such support (today it is much better, but Windows still rules in this case). In theory Windows can be left alone without support in the future and this is impossible to do with Linux. Nobody will steal its drivers.

At that point I completely agree. Hardware should have a good documenatation and public domain driver for at least one os.

Nope, it's better to do what Linux does, because you will fully use your memory. Windows uses swap without a reason and wastes memory. If Windows doesn't kill anything then it crashes in some scenarios. Btw. did you mean swap file?

If OOM kills web server, server is down anyway. It doesn't matter if kernel still works.

I'm not interested in mobiles and I do care about userland. GNU is big shit.

Ok, but I was interested. I like GNU much more than not GNU user land.

Yes, and Linux documentation says: "in MOST situations"

Yes, but we were talking about memory over committing and not about killing a process - you agreed above it's a good thing when the process is killed when it does something stupid.

I don't need 100 file systems. What I don't need and is there I consider as a bloat.
I checked vmlinuz which doesn't have any driver since they are in modules as you say, and it is bigger than OpenBSD with all drivers ...
Modules are good, but OpenBSD beats Linux in that aspect without using them.

Yes and I don't need 100 file systems neither and that's why I'm using just one at the same time. As far as I know Arch' vmlinuz have compiled drivers and file systems in (not all of the drivers are shipped as modules in Arch). For example my vmlinuz in Kubuntu is just 4.7MB. I don't see how OpenBSD beats Linux in this aspect.

If OOM kills web server, server is down anyway. It doesn't matter if kernel still works.

If it kills a web server it's probably doing this to save system from crash. However, in Linux you can decide what processes can and can't be killed by the OOM killer:

It is the job of the linux 'oom killer' to sacrifice one or more processes in order to free up memory for the system when all else fails. It will also kill any process sharing the same mm_struct as the selected process, for obvious reasons. Any particular process leader may be immunized against the oom killer if the value of its /proc/<pid>/oomadj is set to the constant OOM_DISABLE (currently defined as -17).

Yes, but we were talking about memory over committing and not about killing a process - you agreed above it's a good thing when the process is killed when it does something stupid.

Documentation also talks about memory overcommiting, not buffer overflows ...

Originally Posted by kraftman

Yes and I don't need 100 file systems neither and that's why I'm using just one at the same time. As far as I know Arch' vmlinuz have compiled drivers and file systems in (not all of the drivers are shipped as modules in Arch). For example my vmlinuz in Kubuntu is just 4.7MB. I don't see how OpenBSD beats Linux in this aspect.

As far as I know Linux is fully modular when comes to drivers. What I said is Arch Linux probably has compiled some drivers in. I don't know if OpenBSD would be smaller, but while unmodified Linux can run on embedded systems it shows it's not bloated. Size of the kernel is just one thing and there are others that matters also - cost of operations. Bloated kernel can't be fast and Linux is very fast. Its package is big, because it contains a lot of drivers, features and file systems, but you normally use just few percent of this. When comes to user land I think Arch Linux is example of distribution that's not more bloated than OpenBSD. You start with a kernel and few tools. Distributions like Ubuntu seems to be bloated for some people, but they have different purpose.

If NetBSD runs on "toaster" (stupid, but ok), why would not run on mobile phone. It would only require few drivers. Android also has patched Linux kernel and even different userland.

Ok, that's good. Linux also runs on the "toasters", so it seems NetBSD and Linux are both good in this case. Yes, Android has some modifications (their going into mainline), but you can even launch Ubuntu on your Android phone. So, even "bloated" Ubuntu runs on mobiles.